Ehh, you'd be surprised! I suspect very few engineers are "walking around without anything to do". I think modeling the median tech employee as someone who wan

Ehh, you'd be surprised! I suspect very few engineers are "walking around without anything to do". I think modeling the median tech employee as someone who wants to sit around and do nothing is inaccurate - most want to do something productive or fulfilling. Left to their own devices the average engineer in the average tech corporation will trend towards doing something. The real trick is whether or not that thing is of high value to the company. You can think about work almost as a gas - it expands to fill the container it's in. Which is to say, if you hire more people, those people will come up with work to occupy themselves. And I don't mean this in a "people are stupid and they will work on stupid menial shit" way - they will actually (in the median) try to come up with something they think is meaningful and important! The problem is that this "bottom up" approach where people at the leaf nodes of the org tree come up with their own work requires intense curation from the top, otherwise the natural tendency is for lots of teams to form to very excitedly ship a lot of stuff of dubious value to the business. tl;dr: The problem isn't engineers sitting around idle, it's that unguided engineers tend to get very busy shipping stuff that doesn't matter, or may actually be destructive to the business. Side note: Google is like this internally, and I suspect (having never worked at FB) that Meta is likely similar. Upper management provides very little product guidance, so figuring out what work should be done and what they should ship is decided very close to the leaf nodes of the company. This IMO goes a long way to explain why Google cancels so much stuff - many, many engineering hours are spent shipping products that do not matter, and eventually the company has to wind it down.